Cox Communications’ Jay Rolls has taken on a new title as part of the cable operator’s reorganization efforts.
Rolls’ official new title is senior vice president of technology architecture, but he said he was abbreviating it to senior vice president of architecture because the former “doesn’t roll off the tongue very well.”
Rolls was previously senior vice president of technology development, but Scott Hatfield now has the similar title of senior vice president of technology. Cox started reorganizing after senior vice president of engineering and CTO Chris Bowick informed the company of his plan to retire sometime this year.
While Hatfield will oversea the IT and engineering departments, Rolls will be able to focus more on future technologies and networking within the cable industry in his new role. With the merging of the IT and engineering departments, Rolls now reports to Hatfield.
In 2006, Rolls took over leadership of technology engineering across Cox’s entire triple-play platform, and then added the additional duty of developing Cox’s wireless services. At the same time, Rolls was providing strategic development for all of Cox’s enterprise-wide engineering design, development and future technologies for the company’s residential and business product lines.
“We just reorganized and realized that one of the fallacies of our model was that we were asking me and some other people to do both [current products and strategic development] simultaneously, so in our new org structure they’ll be broken apart,” Rolls said. “My new role is going to be just focused on the planning, the strategy and what’s coming up, and less to do with getting products out of the door.”
As for the reorganization effort that is currently underway, Rolls said it has barely started.
“No reporting relationships have changed,” he said. “This is really in the incubation stage. We have to figure out all of the new organization structure.”
Rolls is among the nine Vanguard Award winners who will be recognized for their outstanding contributions to the cable industry at next month’s Cable Show in Washington, D.C. (story here). Rolls said the Cable Show will be a good opportunity to expand upon his new role of networking with his peers in the cable industry.
“[The Cable Show] is a huge networking event, so a lot of it will be about sitting down with peers to compare notes and ideas,” he said. “One of my new roles will be becoming more involved in networking with peers in the industry than time allowed before. I’ve done it before, but I was really bound by focusing on getting these products out the door. Now I’ll be able to focus a little bit more on the collaboration side.”
